LJ Higgins

This essay LJ Higgins has a total of 693 words and 4 pages.
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LJ Higgins
Professor Shock
Critical Reading and Writing I
15 September 2016
Prosperity After Despair
Steve Harvey was living out of his car at the time and making $50 a week. "All I knew was that I could make people laugh," he told the magazine. Harvey shared the moment he hit rock bottom. "I sat down and started crying, but a voice said, ‘If you keep going, I'm going to take you places you've never been,' " he said. "It was like God said, ‘Don't quit, you're almost there. " After three years of struggling, Harvey pulled out of homelessness by landing his first major gig in 1993 as host of "Showtime at the Apollo," which led to his comedy television series, " The Steve Harvey Show " in 1996. Since then, he's been very successful. He now hosts his own daytime talk show, a morning radio show, and has hosted "Family Feud" and Miss Universe — not to mention he cemented his name into Hollywood's Walk of Fame . As he strives to become the "smartest working man in show business," Harvey's past homelessness is still a driving factor for success. "I'm running from homelessness," he said. "I can't ever be in that position again. If my show gets canceled, I've got three more. I don't have any free time, but I have 12 jobs." (Huffington Post)
Success is not about having the most of something and accomplishing the most of something, s uccess is about having triumphs or prosperity after failure. As in Steve Harvey's perspective, he became homeless for 3 years before having his first gig and start making actual money; success can take hours or it can take decades. The fine thing about it is that no matter the situation and is true about every single famous person; work equals success!
In another instance, Mike Piazza had successes in a different way and still got to the MLB. He got drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1988 in the 62th round. He was never meant to get drafted, the only reason he did is because Tommy Lasorda ( Manager of Dodgers at the time) is Piazza's Godfather and Mike's father asked Lasorda to draft him as a favor, as an I.O.U! Now today? Mike Piazza is the best hitting catcher in the history of baseball. He had failures once he got into the organization, he got put onto the backburner and just stuffed in the Minor Leagues and nobody knew about him. Therefore, he kept practicing and perfecting his craft to where nobody could no longer ignore him.
Long before the iPhone made him the god of gadgets, Steve Jobs launched his tech career by hacking land lines to make free long-distance calls. Behind every success story is an embarrassing first effort, a stumble, a setback or a radical change of direction. It's these first clumsy steps on the road to fame and fortune that fascinate writer Seth Fiegerman , who edits the blog OpeningLines.org, a collection of case studies on the origins of famous careers. "When you see someone who's very successful, you almost imagine that it was a foregone conclusion, that they're a genius, that they were destined for great things," says Fiegerman , who began the blog in 2009, after an early setback in his own career. "I think the big takeaway is failure and setbacks, far from being uncommon, are in many ways essential." ( Smits onian Magazine) T herefore by him having a slip up in his life, he learned from his lesson and became CEO and Founder of Apple, the most impressive technol ogical advancement of the modern era.